Wherever he went he found the city well ordered and cleanly, with architectural monuments everywhere; and in the parks and gardens he went through the old experience of surprise that the children could speak French so well. In the Luxembourg Gardens he watched them in groups with their nurses and perambulators and toys, and to him the children were like flowers and the nurses stately flowers, and the babble and child laughter and twittering made delicate and merry music. Never had he seen such child-happiness, such utter joy in living; and he felt convinced this must be the child-key to France. Window-shopping also was his keen delight as he traversed the boulevards and the Rue de la Paix. He even ventured to enter, and was not met with scowls—nor did he hear a word equivalent to the “damned Yankees.” The crowds upon the boulevards were varied, interesting and cosmopolite. Yes, there was an atmosphere; this atmosphere was Paris; Paris was to be his home; its air of hospitality, of world-welcomer and host, found in him a ready and a heartfelt response.
In the French language Louis had by now acquired a very fair degree of ease, and a vocabulary sufficiently covering the colloquial and the literary for his present purpose. His accent was good and on the way to becoming Parisian. Thus, prepared, with all his hard, gruelling work back of him, he felt at ease, but with a due sense of the close call he had had—six weeks! Had he been trained by any teacher other than Moses Woolson, in his high school days, and had he not all his life been in fine physical condition—which means no nerves—it is doubtful if he could have stood the strain of preparation.
The examinations were to be, severally, written, drawn, and oral. They were to cover a period of three weeks. The number of candidates for admission was large, covering all departments.
The great trial was now under way. The free hand drawing, the mechanical drawing, and an esquisse en loge of a simple architectural project, went smoothly enough for Louis; perhaps with some difficulty for others. The real test for him would lie in the oral examinations, which were conducted in little amphitheatres, a professor presiding, and all aspirants free to come and go, as they did in a steady stream. Louis himself had been one of these wanderers awaiting his turn. The candidate under fire thus was by no means lonely; indeed, he deeply wished to be alone with his inquisitor.
Came Louis’s turn for mathematics. For audience he had some twenty strange faces, all rather scared. The examining professor, elderly and of quiet poise, received him most courteously as a stranger in the land, a guest of France, and an aspirant to the Beaux Arts; that it was a pleasure to welcome him, that he need not feel in the least embarrassed, that the inquisition would proceed at a moderate pace, and that Louis was free to solve any problem in any way he liked, the objective being solely to discover the extent of his understanding, not of his memory. Then the examining professor settled to the work. For over an hour—Lord knows how long it was—he put Louis through a steady gruelling—always kindly, however—such as Louis had never known, never dreamed of, never believed could be so. In the midst of it he recalled Monsieur Clopet’s “I don’t know about the rest of you” and he came of a sudden into his true stride, which he held to the end. For, after a heartbreaking crisis, he suddenly found himself actually thinking in terms of mathematics, and, accordingly, lost all fear, relaxed and let his mind go free. From beginning to end he did not make a fluke. At the close, the examining professor, who had become quite interested when he found he could increase the difficulties, pressed Louis’s hand and said: “I felicitate you, Monsieur Sullivan: you have the mathematical imagination which is rather rare. I wish you well.”
Now, of all things Louis might have said he did not possess, the mathematical imagination would head the list in a large way. He knew, in a small way, he had been charmed in his high school by the novelties of the ideas set forth in geometry and algebra. But there they were simply discipline, founded categorically on the books. And in the books was no imagination that he could discern. Perhaps, after all, it was the freedom of Monsieur Clopet’s classroom and Louis’s enthusiasm at each beautiful demonstration, and the many pointed questions he asked of Monsieur Clopet, that had led the latter to speak as he did concerning “an American.” However this may be, Louis found the open world of mathematics; that it was possible to think in such terms as it was possible to think in French—for doing this latter, also, was an act of imagination. And now from the secret places of this new world there came a Siren call which perturbed Louis sadly for many years. Toward this new world Louis turned many a wistful thought thereafter: It was a land of Romance.
Now came the questioning in History, and Louis was
